The extent of premature death and ill health in the developing world is staggering. Death and ill health on such a scale are matters of concern in their own right. They also foster a brake on economic development. It was these twin concerns that led the international community to put health...

The COVID-19 crisis has starkly illustrated both the strengths and limitations of U.S. biomedical innovation institutions as deployed to fight a pandemic. These innovation institutions include not just intellectual property law, but also other legal systems that structure incentives for...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the World Bank Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) while it lasted with the aim of providing lessons for future insurance-linked pandemic financing. The paper argues that with diseases capable of becoming a pandemic posing existential threat to...

How has government healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments in providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending in reducing COVID deaths is conditional on the existence of...

Differential access to health care is commonly cited as a source of heterogeneity in the health effects of environmental exposure, yet little causal evidence exists to support such claims. We test this hypothesis by utilizing exogenous variation in both access to health care and environmental...

With the election of President Donald Trump, no domestic policy is a bigger target for change than the Affordable Care Act (ACA), former President Obama's signature health insurance law. His very first executive order, signed within hours of being inaugurated, was aimed at rolling back parts of...

We examine the relationship between income and health with the purpose of establishing the extent to which the distribution of health in a population contributes to income inequality and is itself a product of that inequality. The evidence supports a substantial impact of ill-health on income,...